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TruthBook Religious News Blog



Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Religious Thoughts and Feelings Not Limited to One Part of Brain

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 9, 2009

Brain researchers trying to understand the neural basis of religious belief have concluded that the brain has no special region or network for this task. Rather, it depends on general networks that exist for other purposes.

A team led by Dr. Jordan Grafman of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke questioned volunteers about their religious beliefs while monitoring the blood flow in their brains with a scanning machine. Extra blood flow is assumed to reflect the activity of neurons in a specific region of the brain.

Different networks of neurons sprang into action when subjects were asked their view of three sets of statements about the religious beliefs, Dr. Grafman and colleagues report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In all three cases the neural activity in the subjects’ brains corresponded to brain networks known to have other, nonreligious functions. These include the theory of mind networks, used to predict other people’s intentions.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania, said Dr. Grafman’s findings were in line with other research that has so far failed to find any specific structure in the brain that is dedicated to religious belief. “Religion has so many different aspects that it would be very unlikely to find one spot in the brain where religion and God reside,” Dr. Newberg said.

But he expressed doubt as to whether the biological correlates of religious belief, as visualized in brain scans like those taken by Dr. Grafman, in fact captured all of what religion is. “There may be other elements that science is not capable of measuring,” Dr. Newberg said.

In his own work Dr. Newberg looks at subjects undergoing religious experiences, like speaking in tongues or meditating. In “How God Changes Your Brain,” a book being published later this month, Dr. Newberg reports that certain regions of subjects’ brains have enlarged areas of neural activation after many months of intensive meditation.

He questioned whether asking subjects questions about religion when they were not in a religious frame of mind would capture much of interest about religious belief.

Dr. Grafman said that religious cohesion for a common purpose, and the ability to infer what others are thinking, would each have been favored by evolution, along with the theory of mind networks that serves both systems.

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